Body and affect
in the intercultural encounter
René Devisch
African Studies centre
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ISBN-10: 9956-764-01-9 ISBN-13: 978-9956-764-01-3
© Langaa & African Studies Centre, 2017
Acknowledgements ... ix
Plates ... xi
Preface, Koen Stroeken ...xv
1. Introduction: the co-implication of anthropologists and their hosts ... 1
The book and this chapter ... 1
The intercultural encounter: perspectives and challenges ... 3
The anthropologist and the host groups... 5
Feeling affected and questioned ... 9
Ethical commitment and shared humanity ...12
The Yakaphone people ...18
Reciprocal anthropology and innovative research ... 24
Reversal of perspective: seeing here from there ...24
The body-group-world weave ...31
Towards an ontology of resonance and co-naturality ... 36
A matrixial understanding of subjectification... 38
Overview ... 40
Part 1 The shock of the multicultural 2. The multicentric world: interview by Jan Van Pelt ... 53
3. In praise of Jean-Marc Ela, advocate of the people of below ... 71
4. Frenzy, violence and ethical renewal in Kinshasa ... 77
Method of inquiry ... 81
Kinshasa... 82
An orgy of violence and ruptures in the 1990s ... 89
From illusion to fury ...90
Proletarian uprisings ...92
Positions of failure ...94
Predatory economy of the street ...96
Violence seeking to reverse social injustice ...97
Ideals and norms fade away ...99
Poor and wealthy in a common void ... 101
The ethical dawn of oniric regeneration... 102
Mimesis ends in exhaustion ... 104
Frenzy and ostentation... 106
Critique and creativity ... 111
The dawn of a new cosmology ... 114
Conclusion ... 116
Part 2 Cultural embedding of the body, senses and meaning 5. A dancing mask, estranged in the museum ... 119
The dancing masks ... 120
A cult enactment turned into a curio ... 122
The masculine gaze and its incipient deconstruction... 124
The mask’s view upon the observer ... 127
6. Affects and senses in healing ... 131
Affliction cults’ life-bearing meaning ... 132
Blending of sensory capacities ... 134
Borderlinking and the dynamic of homeopathy ... 141
Conclusion ... 144
Part 3
The moral economy of the intercultural
7. Salvation of souls: the Belgian masculine missionary ... 149
The “civilising mission” ... 151
The Belgian missionary endeavour in the Congo... 153
Christian modernisation in the homeland ... 153
The missionaries’ styles and strategies... 155
Indigenising or the adaptation effort... 155
The assimilation strategy ... 159
Harmonious association attempts ... 160
The whitening trap ... 161
The educational endeavour ... 163
Schools and books as subjugation ... 165
Different styles of education ... 166
The indigenising approach to education ... 167
Towards a practical education, but unsuccessful ... 169
The association option ... 169
Higher learning and university ... 170
Epilogue ... 172
8. Anthropology cataloguing classical African medicine René Devisch and Mbonyinkebe Sebahire ... 175
Classical African medicine and health care ... 176
Local cultural perspectives on body and health ... 182
The life-force and life-flow ... 182
The gendering of health ... 186
Symptoms and cultural etiology ... 189
Diagnosis... 189
Cultural idioms of distress ... 191
Divinatory etiology ... 194
Treatment ... 197
Affliction and healing cults ... 198
The synergism of healing procedures ... 201
Transforming devices and cultural inducers ... 203
Conclusion ... 211
9. Plural health care in Kinshasa René Devisch, Lapika Dimonfu, Jaak Le Roy and Peter Crossman ... 213
The action-research ... 216
Research setting... 216
Research techniques ... 217
Findings ... 221
From data to interpretation ... 226
From research to action ... 228
Quality of care ... 232
Organisation of the healers ... 233
Benefits for the community ... 233
Collaboration with biomedical care ... 234
Cooperation with faith healers ... 234
Discussion ... 235
Contemporary Congo’s shattered mirrors ... 236
The lay therapy management group ... 237
The mind set of the researchers ... 241
Product of Western-derived science ... 246
Conclusion ... 248
Interdisciplinary thesaurus ... 249
Notes ... 277
References ... 281
Index ... 301
The Yakaphone communities in southwestern DR Congo and Kinshasa have welcomed me generously. Let me mention with gratitude the elders from Taanda and my collaborator Ulenguluka Kasaamba in particular. In Kinshasa, I enjoyed the steady institutional support of professor Lapika Dimonfu (University of Kinshasa), as well as Muyika Musungu’s collaboration. The multifarious encounter has fostered a feeling of recognition and an ethical debt within me, along with a longing to render an authentic report, one reinforced by anthropological reflexivity.
The book owes a great deal to the generous advice offered by professor emeritus Wim van Binsbergen and dr Hugo Stuer MD, as well as the forbearance of professor Francis Nyamnjoh, editor-in- chief of Langaa in a joint venture with the African Studies Centre.
I would like to cordially thank Dr. Sean O’ Dubhghaill and Bart Van Hoorick for editing my English prose. Professor Oswald Devisch designed the vibrant book cover, something which I feel sets the tone for the co-resonance between the weaving of the local universe of the living and the exploratory meeting. For more than ten years, two different monthly seminars (EBP-BSP; NLS, G. Laforce convener) for psychoanalytical and anthropological reflection, have enriched my space for thought considerably. My hearty thanks go to my seminar colleagues.
The present volume is released in parallel with a complementary volume in French published by Langaa, African Studies Center and Département d’anthropologie & Bruylant Academia at Louvain- Brussels (Devisch 2017b). In a gripping biographic novel, Koen Peeters (2017) pithily recounts the Flemish early roots of my intercultural sensitivity. He closely traces, in Southwest Congo, the steps of my anthropological search for endogenous ways of unrav- elling the unspeakable and of healing the intangible shadow of our selfs.
My affectionate gratitude goes to my wife, Maria De Leeuw.
She joined me and gathered much data on fauna and flora, along with photographic documentation regarding ritual life during the
last four months of my early fieldwork among the Yakaphones.
Currently, her infinite care and that of professionals has enabled this much-delayed publication. Their help contributes to my ability to surpass the progressive multiple sclerosis, which disables me greatly, by providing a fruitful harvest that will hopefully prove to be boundless, as my Yakaphone friends wish me.
Chapters 1 and 6 are original works, written for this book. Sarah Jacobs translated the first part of chapter 1 from French, as Claire Chevalier did for chapter 7. Bregt Brosens volunteered to edit the bibliographic references.
Furthermore, the following chapters are rewrites of previously published essays:
• 2 ‘‘De pluricentrische wereld’’. In Grenzeloze wetenschap: dertig gesprekken met Vlamingen over wetenschappelijk onderzoek, edited by J. Van Pelt, 1997: 35-42. Leuven-Appeldoorn, Garant.
• 4 ‘‘Frenzy, violence, and ethical renewal in Kinshasa’’. Public culture 7, 1995: 593- 629.
• 5 ‘‘Een masker en zijn heimwee’’. In Vertoog en literatuur. Cahier 3: Provincialismen / ontworteling, edited by B. Verschaffel & M.
Verminck, 1993: 177-186. Antwerpen, Meulenhoff, Kritak.
German translation: ‘‘Eine Maske und ihr Heimweh’’, 1993: 132-140, in Provinzialismus, Entwurzelung. Köln: Dinter.
• 7 ‘‘Convertir la différence au Congo: le missionnaire belge masculin’’. In Du missionnaire à l’anthropologue, edited by F.
Laugrand & O. Servais,147-174. Paris: Karthala.
• 8 R. Devisch & Mbonyinkebe Sebahire, ‘‘Medical anthropology and traditional care’’, in Health in Central Africa since 1885: past, present and future, vol.1, edited by P.G. Janssens, M. Kivits & J. Vuylsteke, 1997: 47-64. Brussels: King Baudouin Foundation; Leuven: Peeters.
• 9 R. Devisch, Lapika Dimonfu, J. Le Roy & P. Crossman, ‘‘A community-action intervention to improve medical care services in Kinshasa, Congo: mediating the realms of healers and physicians’’, in Applying health social science best practice in the developing world, edited by N. Higginbotham, R. Briceno- Leon & N. Johnson, 2001: 107-140. London: Zed, 2001.
Plate 1: Map of Yaka land in the Kwaango
While this map of the Diocese of Popokabaka is also used by the civil authority, it approximately corresponds to the region inhabited by Yakaphone people and which is labelled as Kwaango or Yaka land. The map of the diocese was designed by Luc van den Steen s.j., who holds the copyright.
Plate 2: Ndzaambi statuette
The sculpture comes from the extreme southwest of DR Congo, along the Angolan frontier, forming a borderland of Yakaphone and Holophone people. It was obtained at the ‘‘Marché d’objets d’art’’ close to Kinshasa’s Central train station, in September 2001.
Plate 3: Kholuka mask,
The mask stem from Yaka region, at the early 1900s. Chapter 5 deals with it.
The Ethnographic Museum of Antwerp obtained the mask from Breckpot auction house. It was catalogued as AE 0516 and housed there until 2011 when it was moved to the new MAS museum. It is 71 cm high. I gratefully acknowledge that Mrs Els de Palmenaer, from MAS, granted me access to the photograph of this mask. The kholuka mask is second in a series of dancing masks (see Devisch 2017b: photo 4) crafted towards the end of the circumcised boys’ initiatory seclusion of each Yakaphone village community. The shape of the sculpted face, its upturned nose and rich ornaments are typical in northern Kwaango region, even today. This dancing mask evokes the ever-renewing mythopoeic cosmogony and displays blissfulness and connectedness, in which the society and the emerging masculine generation creatively participate.
Plate 1: Map of Yaka land in the Kwaango
Plate 2: Ndzaambi statuette
Plate 3: Kholuka mask,
The book is a long-awaited contribution to anthropology, which will establish René Devisch as one of the discipline’s major fore- runners. In a time of intellectual crisis in the humanities and social sciences, leaving a complete generation aghast in postmodern entanglements, this reflection on nonverbal, sensory forms of comprehension and knowledge in the world brings us back to the basics and roots of anthropology. Formed as a fieldworker during the early contractions of decolonization, just after Foreman fought Cassius Clay, the author has the capacity to cast a wide net over the DR Congo’s history and in the same throw synthesize virtually all theoretical explorations on the phenomenology of the body since the late 1960s. In his unique take on anthropology’s past and future, Devisch will inspire a new generation who did not have the chance to discover his works, many of which hidden like gems. This book offers new material, built upon a coherent body of papers, some of which have become rare finds among google’s bin of citations.
Most of all, Body and affect in the intercultural encounter weds ex- periential anthropology to both psychoanalysis and subaltern speech in a manner that will inspire those seeking the missing link be- tween postcolonial Africanists and the new wave of ontologists working in other regions of the world (such as Holbraad and Pedersen, following Strathern and Viveiros de Castro). Some origins of their intellectual journey can be found in this book. Those wanting to tackle recent critiques on the ontological turn will find in these pages, manifestly between the lines, a torchlight showing the way ahead. To paraphrase the ever more serious, no longer disparaged effort of «salvage ethnography’, this book does academia the favour of salvage anthropology, in the sense of reminding us of our scholarly purpose before it is too late, that is: before the major intellectual streams — questions, concerns, sensitivities — that fed our discipline become extinct.
Weaving together experientially salient moments of personal life, African and global history, this book on cosmology, sorcery and healing offers a much-awaited overview of the theory of René
Devisch. The central themes are brought together here through older and new work, because by far not sufficiently known among Africanists older and new. I name some of the ingredients of a richly flavoured dish: Devisch’s three-fields method, approaching African traditions of healing (including objects and practices of well-being, illness and treatment) in terms of concordance and rupture between the three fields of body, society and cosmology; his concept of the matrixial in culture, revealing how the imaginary subtends the symbolical, indeed masculine order; his attention to the (re)productive dynamic of border-linking; his understanding of the ethnographic (sensory) self at the heart of anthropology, defending the extimate and bifocal to-and-fro of the fieldworker as key to intercultural comprehension imbued with the subaltern experience.
Each of these themes has been uniquely developed by Devisch.
They have benefited from 40 years of fieldwork-led reflection, and been attuned to processes of recent social change. Together these themes stem from the postcolonial turn he has contributed to, and of which his work has been exemplary.
The style of the author is entirely his own, known among his former students as Devischean: only Devilish to the positivist mind reducing cultural knowledge to the factual, seeking the angelic beauty of data. His words, not fearing to contort English semantics, explore without pretending to know, evoke rather than name, seek to speak in ways that leave space for the unsaid. That is the way he chose to pay tribute to the creativity of the communities he was part of. It is his humble sign of respect to them.
After reading this book, questions will remain. At least one matter struck me and may be raised here beforehand. In exploring the ongoing lived meaning of long-term intergenerational experiences, including trauma in postcolonial and post-war Congo and Flanders (Belgium), the author bridges two kinds of data, or rather ‘relata’:
the not so manifest individual lifeworlds and the even more latent collective pasts of communities. Does he mean to clear the path for a new field of research at the intersection of social sciences and humanities, namely where anthropology and history meet? The encounter never materialized between two other Belgian Africanisms, the all too synchronic take on culture by Luc de Heusch
and the all too diachronic account of history by his compatriot Jan Vansina. When Devisch delves into post-coldwar Kinshasa, where he witnessed the frenzy of which the Pentecostalist revolution partakes, does he observe the atavistic expression of colonial trauma, the remnants of African traditions of regeneration, the reflection of millenial capitalism, the contractions of culture in the (re)making, or all at once? I advise the reader to slowly savour this dish, and to share any thoughts with the cook.
Koen Stroeken
Introduction: the co-implication of anthropologists and their hosts
Let me first narrate a confrontational encounter in Kinshasa that may testify my hosts’ alliance. In 1986, I returned to Kinshasa to participate in the Third International Colloquium of the CERA (Centre d’études des religions africaines) on the theme of African mediations of the sacred. Meanwhile, I aimed to take up some threads from my previous stays in the Democratic Republic of Congo during my university studies (1965-1971) and my anthropological research in Kwaango land (1971-1974). This return happened to inaugurate my annual research stays in Kinshasa, which happened until 2003. On the eve of the colloquium, a confrontational encounter had occurred in the shanty town of Bumbu. Following a number of informative queries on affliction and healing cults in Kinshasa, I invited the Yakaphone cult healer, Kha Lusuungu, to submit his questions to me in return. (I will respond to it in the paragraph on the ethical.) His piercing and insightful questioning of my anthropological work has remained on my mind:
“But you white man who knows so much about our divination and healing, who are you? You whites have ripped the heart out of our culture in condemning our beliefs in spirits, our sacrifices, and all our initiatory, divinatory and healing arts as belonging to satan. Who are you? What allows you to speak for us, about how it is in the ancestral world? Tell us who you are, interested as you appear in what is the most intimate part of ourselves”.
The book and this chapter
This chapter, as a prelude to the book, revisits the intercultural encounters I had from the late 1960s onwards with the cultural other; the most enduring took place in the DR Congo. Following
my MA studies, from 1965 in the capital city of Kinshasa, I had the privilege to immerse myself around the clock in the Yakaphones’
activities and thoughts, from November 1971 till October 1974, in the borderland with Angola in the southwest of the country; and intermittently from 1986 to 2003 in Kinshasa’s shanty towns during annual three week stays. The encounters were mutually enriching, surprising and in some instances, intersubjectively, conceptually and epistemologically disconcerting. The intercultural encounter aimed at close egalitarian interaction and reciprocal empathy.
Let me outline the structure and content of this first chapter. Its first section analyses the perspectives, specific obstacles and challenges that are part and parcel of the intercultural encounter.
There is no doubt that this encounter has led me to revise many of my assumptions and habitual ways of thinking that I acquired during my childhood, youth and university education. A second section sketches some of the encounters I had with otherness in its various forms, including the encounters I made within myself. Section three analyses the predominant emotions and feelings that I experienced during my stays in Congo. A fourth section demonstrates how, during my first stay of almost three years, an ethical alliance developed between my Yakaphone interlocutors and me. This alliance strives towards a balanced reciprocity, hence an interpersonal equality and reciprocal exchange in “the meeting of giving and receiving” (as Léopold Sédar Senghor so famously expressed). Here, I take my time to define under what conditions the encounter, such as set up by Yakaphone elders, resulted on both sides in a transcultural or panhuman awareness in our hearts of an intensely shared but hardly definable humanity. In a fifth section, I characterise the Yaka society in both its rural and urban environment. The sixth section outlines how the particular type of reciprocal anthropology that I practised led to an auto-anthropological reflexivity susceptible to unravel some unthought alienating dynamic in the author’s native Flemish- speaking culture. It thus awakened an intercultural reciprocity of perspectives between there and here, as if here were there. Laying bare the specifically Yaka, hence Bantu-African view on the ‘body- group-world’ weave, this type of reciprocal and perspectivist anthropology discerned the heuristic of the ‘three bodies’ and the ontological principle of a ‘co-resonance and co-naturality of life-
forms’ in the local universe of the living. To unravel the large segment of existence that is beyond words and factual reasoning, the analysis turns to the ‘later Lacan’ (see thesaurus) focusing on the unconscious desire and seldom spoken-of affects (such as, excitement, envy, anxiety, aversion). The last section of the chapter provides a brief overview of the various chapters in this book.
The book provides a detailed analysis of the various dimensions set out in the first chapter. It offers a thematic selection of both thoroughly reworded articles that are out of reach as well as brand new chapters. As a whole, the volume covers four decades of my research and experiences, thoughts and reflexivity as a researcher, academic and supervisor of doctoral dissertations in the field of Africanist anthropology. Adopting a phenomenological perspectivist approach (Merleau-Ponty, Viveiros de Castro, Willerslev), this book unravels the hosts’ perspectives on, and commitment to classical Bantu-African healing cults, parallel consultation of physicians and healers, sorcery’s threat and its homeopathic ritual reversion. The volume furthermore takes into consideration the widespread proletarian outbursts of violence in 1991 and 1993 expressing people’s disenchantment with the catastrophic hyperinflation and president Mobutu’s millenarian Popular Movement of the Revolution, and also with the disillusioning modernisation. The aim is to affranchise in particular Yakaphone people’s zest for life, tenacity and sociality, along with their investigative and epistemological traditions, particularly centered on their quest for health.
The intercultural encounter: perspectives and challenges
With this book, I try to break down imaginary barriers that wall off the intercultural encounter, and aim to demonstrate the encounter’s specific opportunities and heartbreaking challenges. The encounters I was privileged to have, led me to revise many of the assumptions and habits of mind that I had acquired in my home country. I even dare to suggest that my academic training in Kinshasa (1965-1971) and my initial experience as an anthropologist (1972-1974) occurred during a pivotal phase in Europe’s history and the Belgian colonial enterprise. Interwoven with the genealogy of colonial and
reactionary reflexes of the collective imagination in my home country and Western Europe, this period garnered hardly any critical thinking regarding the intercultural development from policy makers or the mass media at all.
It seems to me that the astounding, blind and uncritical political, economic and cultural subjection by the white colonial leaders, steered by prejudice and passions, in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Africa, foreshadowed an even more disconcerting stigmatisation. Here, I am referring to the stigma that affected immigrants from the Mediterranean, who were brought into Western Europe during its recovery from the second world war in order to work in mining, roadworks and construction. This marks the beginning of a history of immigration, a history that Europe did not manage as a complex and enriching intercultural encounter, but instead belittled the immigrants in humiliation, submitting them to the inexorable logic of capital and of the world market.
Today, member states of the European Union seem to be losing ground against nationalist and conservative groups reacting to the growing numbers of cultural others settling in Europe.
Overestimating their values, their autonomy and the living standards that they acquired “at a high price”, these groups identify with an ancient Europe and perceive the cultural other as an intruding alterity from which they apprehensively intend to protect themselves.
The media machine underlines the sheer horror of the recent Paris and Brussels “killings” (Badiou 2016) more than the linked and yet deadlier attacks that took place in the beginning of 2016 in Baghdad, Damascus or Lahore. Moreover, these mass media pull public opinion back into a reactionary and anxious space. Political deciders as well as the press that shape public opinion reproduce imperialist and repressive characteristics and old patriot reflexes of a patriarchal Europe, along the line of its long history of conquest and colonialism.
Conversely, identity exhortations by a number of Islamic religious authorities find fertile soil in the second or third generation descendants of Mediterranean labour migrants. The exhortations are only little understood by Belgian policy makers, numerous nation- states in Europe, and the greater part of the mass media and public opinion. The latter tend to amalgamate the jobless youngsters and
middle aged as of North African origins. They are described by the mass media as “deeply frustrated”, finding themselves unreasonably alterised in the metropolises of western Europe and thrown into the same basket with recent war fugitives or refugees, indistinctly designated by the catch-all concept of Muslims. A great number of the younger generation of immigrants sources its models from the social media which no longer know boundaries of space and time.
This generation does not accept the highly unjust and unequal regulation of access to employment, a regulation steered by reflexes characteristic to the old nation-state. Here, I speak specifically of an ethnocentric form of bureaucratic management that is based on traits and identity provisions allegedly linked to ethnocultural origin, home-based education, religious affiliation, equivalence of diplomas, linguistic skills, professional experience. Without being given equal opportunities (to be hired, to find wage labour or employment, to participate in consumption and to have a future) due to this colonial- type “regulation”, a segment of the most gifted and ambitious youngsters feels deeply frustrated. Some literally ignite to commit indescribable bloodshed, while others take action in view of emigration to North-America which provides greater equal opportunities.
In the remainder of this book, while remaining aware of the global context, my focus is on the lived encounter in Africa, particularly in Kinshasa and southwestern DRC. I also examine its resonance with my Flemish-Belgian roots.
The anthropologist and the host groups
This section outlines some of the intercultural encounters I had with various shapes of alterity, which in turn have defied me to shed light on the shadows within myself.
Ever since childhood, I was fascinated by the relationship to otherness. I was born and grew up in the northwest of Belgium, close to the North Sea along the border with France. I threw myself with great enthusiasm at the intercultural encounter when I arrived in the DRC in 1965, in the wake of the political independences won in Africa1. At this time, I was being trained as a Jesuit and was heavily inspired by Charles de Foucauld, a hermit, linguist and
anthropologist who, in in the early 1900s, shared the life conditions of the Tuareg and the Berber in the Haggar mountains (in the Tamanrasset region of the Algerian Saharan South). In the words of my Jesuit advisor in Kimwenza-Kinshasa (at the Institut de philosophie St Pierre-Canisius), in September 1965, “I had come to the DRC to study the existential questions and philosophical knowledge of the ‘African’. I was meant to free myself of Eurocentric preconceptions by exposing myself to the cultural ways of life and life conditions I had never faced before. In dialogue with my African confrères, we ought to selfcritically learn how to place ourselves at the service of the local populations in culturally sensitive and thoughtful ways”.
During this time, I unwillingly appeared like a heir to the
“civilising mission” which had encouraged the Congolese to convert, educate and to develop themselves in the white mirror. I stayed with Congolese fellow Jesuit students of philosophy who felt like strangers to themselves, upset by the slow pace of decolonisation that, in many ways, seemed more rhetorical than emancipating. All along my university curriculum, I joined my Congolese fellows in their resistance to the existing ethnographic monographs and evolutionist theories which to them had been constructed in their entirety by the colonising West and were testimony of an ethnocentric perspective affected by racism.
I discretely participated in student debates and was influenced by the Negritude movement much like my peers; these experiences gradually exposed me to both the genius and colonial wounds of the African peoples. Levi-Strauss’ structuralism, which I encountered during my master in philosophy in Kimwenza-Kinshasa, felt like a liberation after the prejudicial, evolutionist, Western centric ethnology that I had been confronted with earlier on. Later, Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenological approach, with its sensitivity to sensorial, corporeal and intersubjective experiences and its plurality of perspectives would allow me to adapt my anthropological approach to the life-world and epistemology of the host society.
My choice of host society in the beginning of 1971 was influenced by a number of experiences. Firstly, I was heavily influenced by ethnographic works regarding Congolese cultures and societies, even though I read these with great ambivalence and
criticism. My anthropological research project took shape under the influence of professor Jan Vansina, whom I met at the University of Kinshasa in 1970-1971, as well as of Léon De Beir (1975a, b), a Jesuit who recommended the location for my ethnographic insertion.
The day I entered the field, I was no longer a Jesuit.
Groups and networks in ten African countries hosted me for periods of time lasting from two to six weeks. In Tunis 1985, I participated in a psychiatric hospital ward in its transition from an asylum to an “open door” hospital service (Devisch & Vervaeck 1986, Jeddi & Harzallah 1985). In 1988, I supported Jos Van de Loo’s ethnographic research amongst the Guji-Oromo in south Ethiopia (Van de Loo 1990). During the 1990s, I had the chance to join my doctoral students in situ for one or two weeks; these were located in Cairo, the west of Congo, the north of Ghana and the south of Burkina Faso, the east of Kenya, the southeast of Nigeria, the northwest of Tanzania, the southeast of South Africa, the northwest of Namibia, as well as beyond Africa, at a Druze community in the north of Israel. I was unable to join doctoral students of mine in the west of Congo-Brazzaville, the southwest of the DRC, Burundi and Rwanda.
From 1972 to 1974, I was hosted by a Yakaphone group (a cluster of thirteen villages called Taanda) in the northern Kwaango region.
I participated around the clock in as many activities and interactions as possible; this way, I tried to adapt myself as well as I could to my host group, its modes of perception and its universe of the living2. I carefully observed my hosts’ everyday lives and the ways in which they sought health and cared for themselves. I made sure to closely follow family councils, divinatory consultations and rites of passage such as funerals or initiations. I particularly tried to adopt my hosts’
points of view and sought to understand the genius of their culture in its own terms and perspectives and in due respect of its genuineness and ontological self-determination. During this time, I developed a refined sensitivity for issues that appeared indefinable or remained beyond words or factual reasoning. It appeared to me that core foundations and premises of their life-world found expression in surprising weaves of signifiers which touched the indescribable and unthinkable.
From 1986 until 20033, I undertook annual research stays of three weeks or more among the Yakaphone and Koongophone people residing in a number of Kinshasa’s shanty towns (a term which I use as synonymous with squatter settlements or slums). My interaction with Koongophone people had to do with plural health care (see chapter 9) and the prophetic healing communes of the sacred spirit (see Devisch 2017b: chapter 6). The large Kinois zones under study — namely Ngaliema-Camp Luka, Kimbanseke, Masina, Ndjili XII, Mbanza Lemba, Bumbu, Yolo sud and Selembao — then accounted for one-third of Kinshasa’s total population. In the 1980s and 1990s, I experienced these zones to be harsh environments where I witnessed the misery endured on a daily basis by the deprived Kinois. They were actually undergoing a process of profound self- questioning with regard to the contradictions in which they felt themselves caught. Despite political independence, they were facing utter alienation, in part due to the colonial past which was now succeeded by a predatory state, unreliable civil services and the
“politics of the belly” (Bayart 1989).
As displayed on the front cover, a major facet of the context in which the intercultural encounters took place can be depicted by imagining longstanding interpersonal interactions taking place in so-called confidential conversation chairs. These consist of a pair of adjoined chairs but oppositely-oriented in the form of two mirroring shells. This double-chair arrangement positions the pairing such that the persons are seated back-to-back and shoulder-to- shoulder. Such positioning, either actual or imagined, was found to induce communication and exchange in an intimate and unencumbered manner, allowing each to display his or her own perspective of self-determination. Engaging in this brand of intercultural encounter encourages the mood or resonance grounded in close egalitarian interaction, empathy and confidence, in view of being authentic and effective. While exploring mutual interests and comprehension, the exchange is nevertheless unavoidably marked by each informant’s feeling-mind, character, history, predispositions and contextual culture-specific perceptions of the co-resonance of life-forms and useful things in the local universe of the living. In accordance with the objectives of the anthropological encounter, a sensitive, compassionate and transforming experience is aimed at
developing between those who meet in the co-emerging and congruing setting. As argued further on and depicted on the cover, the intercultural exchange does not deepen primarily on the level of words, but deepens by tacitly testifying and nurturing an affinity and co-resonance. In the process, this amounts to an in-depth comprehension of the presuppositions and constituents of the communication, wording and symbolic processes in the common language-bearing group.
Feeling affected and questioned
In what follows, I will briefly lay out my main heedfulness during my stay in Congo. The ideologically and politically charged air had a clear influence on me, both in terms of affect, emotion and questioning. The first period of particular importance was the period of my master studies in philosophy and later in anthropology in Kinshasa (1965 to 1967 and 1969 to 1971), at the dawn of the country’s political independence. (I spent the year 1968-1969 at the Catholic University of Louvain). I felt deeply and increasingly affected by the trauma that the colonial intrusion had left on my Jesuit brothers and university peers. As a Belgian, I found the confrontation with the wounds caused by my own nation-state’s imposed colonisation to be harrowing. In this context, the unprecedented enthusiasm of the nationals, by then called Zairean citizens, swept me away. With their millenarian call and Recourse to Authenticity (also called Return to Authenticity), along with the thrilling nation-building initiatives, president Mobutu and his Party- State pushed the citizens to once and for all free themselves of colonisation. As a Belgian, a student Jesuit and an anthropologist in the making eager to become part of the everyday lives of the Yakaphones, the colonial trauma and the unforeseeable fate immersing the postcolonial state distressed me greatly (see Devisch 2017b: chapter 2). In May 1971, I left the Jesuit order so that I would have the liberty to properly connect with the Yakaphones’
strong preoccupations and to fully engage with their passions. I applied myself to get to know their zest for life, their life-world, their cultural roots and their authentic creativity. I also worked to discover their alienating fates as colonised and conversely to
understand the influence of Mobutu’s return/recourse to authenticity, and the abrupt nationalisation of public health care, education, landed property and extractive enterprise owned by foreigners.
From the beginning of 1972 when I started my research in northern Kwaango, the ideological context led my anthropological sensitivity to avoid any political focus, but increasingly attune itself to the aspirations, life-world and way of life of my host society. It was also this context that gave rise to my ‘postcolonial’ feeling, the feeling of being ethically indebted to my hosts. The recourse to authenticity and the Popular Movement of the Revolution (Mouvement populaire de la révolution, MPR) launched by Mobutu, the
“father” of the emerging Zairean nation, resonated with me on an intersubjective and intercultural level.
In my anthropological experience, the intercultural encounter conjoined fascination and the momentum of discovery with the responsibility that such a meeting entails. Over the years some sort of alliance has continued to develop between the two dimensions of my double-sided endeavour. There is, on the one hand, the relentless effort to consider, as much as is possible, my empathic experiences and research data from the point of view of my hosts and in terms of the people’s characteristics, past and aspirations.
On the other hand, I was determined to provide a theoretical reflection on the intercultural enterprise as well as on the epistemological and ethical questions they raise.
The interbodily, intersubjective and cosmocentric modalities of the Yakaphone people’s articulation of sensory experience, comprehension and communication made me increasingly sensitive to culture-specific, bodily-felt experiences, epistemologies and modes of knowledge production. The anthropological field method adopted by way of a long- and full-time participant research involvement in the host group leaves neither the anthropologist nor the group unaffected. In the unprecedented welcoming and quite intimate meeting between anthropologist and hosts, intuitive insight and empathic comprehension make those involved feel themselves to be affected in their body and the largely unnameable agencies that thrive on the mood of the direct interaction and the unfolding perspective. Unsettling experiences in the exploration through
intercultural contact can sharpen the body’s responsiveness to affects, as well as the senses (Classen 1993, Geurts 2003), emotions and perceptual regimes in a community. These unpredictable and multifarious encounters urge — in the terms of Elisabeth Hsu characterising my approach — the “doing away with the artificiality of studying either semantics (meaning/knowledge) or pragmatics (doing/action)” (Hsu 2012: 57).
From 1986 onwards, my annual research stays in Kinshasa confronted me with the intense bitterness of the Yakaphones’
exclusion from modernity and stirred serious questions within myself.
This bitterness intensified during the 1980s and 1990s, decades that were marked by catastrophic monetary hyperinflation and the abuses of the state’s underpaid civil servants. In September 1991 and January-February 1993, Kinshasa was struck by the same wave of violent and destructive uprisings that was also washing over other big cities in the country. (I was a witness and indirect victim of the uprisings.) Members of all segments of Kinshasa’s population got involved in the protests, which I qualified as luddite or proletarian revolts (see chapter 4). Shortly following these events, the slum dwellers noted a “villagisation” of their environment; by and large, they were referring to a feeling of intensified community solidarity.
Concretely, the neighbourhoods started to organise a network of guards that systemically surveilled the comings and goings of residents, visitors and government officials. Small clusters of neighbouring dwelling units wanting to ensure security and hoping to maximise their odds in the struggle for survival started to establish various systems of solidarity, in particular sharing their bits of staple foods most essential for their children’s growth. Groups of men started draining the marshlands in order to improve the life of squatters. A number of women lined avenues with crops, or developed a small agricultural production outside of the city and collected fuel at ever further distances from their dwellings.
During this period, employment was rare and living conditions were precarious in the suburbs and slums; many earned less than one dollar US per day, the cost of two loaves of bread. Men and women bought second hand clothes that were shipped in bulk from Europe. Mobile phones flooded Kinshasa around 2001.
Disenchanted by their socio-economic exclusion, many highly
qualified individuals remaining jobless were flocking to neopentecostal churches and healing communes of the sacred spirit in order to exorcise their alienation and miserable living conditions by way of parody (Devisch 2017: chapter 6). Here, celebrations in the name of the sacred spirit were echoing the ingenious and sophisticated musical styles of Kinshasa’s artists, as well as the way in which they subtly twist the french language, labelled
“cadavérisation” in the kinois French. This way, members of the churches and communes, artists as well as their fans appropriated the global code, that was impressed upon them by the coloniser through education and mass media. They tailored it to their own local needs, transforming it into a glocal element that unified both the global and local. Sexual exploits in bars and nightclubs, as well as fashion “made in Miguel” — meaning tailored in Paris, London or Brussels — worn by an exclusive circle of Kinshasa’s dandies, was spoofing the spectacle of deception of the rich and privileged (see chapter 4). I dare hypothesise that in the beginning of the 1990s, this parody turned into blind destructiveness during the popular uprisings.
Ethical commitment and shared humanity
As a young anthropologist, I set out to have an encompassing and symmetrical relation of equality with the most significant members of my host society, the Yakaphone people. On an interpersonal level, I intended to be, if possible, on equal footing with my counterpart. Bound by such an alliance, the anthropologist and her counterpart end up in a situation of complicity; they are accomplices unified to such an extent that divergence is eclipsed. In retrospect, the most relevant question is the following: how did the anthropologist and the host society reach some degree of mutual understanding about the complex Yaka universe? How did we deal with the unprecedented fact that a white person from the former colonising nation-state initiated this quest? Could such an alliance result in the transcultural?
Taking part in daily practical activities during my first months in Yitaanda village, I quickly felt a kind of resonance with my host
me and that I was experiencing intimately in dreams, attractions, or overwhelming anxiety. Above all, I felt encouraged to commit all the sensitivity of my flesh (chair, Leib) in my understanding of the emotions, the motivations and existential quests of the people who welcomed me. The alliance I had looked for was built through warm and diligent interviews rather than through formal declarations.
When I arrived, the dramatic death of the head of the Taanda group determined my place in the collective imaginary (see Devisch 2017b: chapters 4 & 5; thesaurus). The first months, I was associated with events that signalled the paroxysmal ruptures caused by chief Taanda’s loss of authority and death, as well as with negotiations and procedures related to the rebirth of the bereaved society and local universe of the living. Along the way, my investigation was moving toward the affliction and healing cults, along with ritual practices that were used to contain the forces of sorcery and bad fate that may further disconcert such crisis. I attended the palavers that applied the oracle’s analysis of the chief ’s death (and the deaths of others) in view of revitalising the sociocultural fabric of the bereaved. Such experiences forced me to clear the epistemological methodology involved. All of this thoroughly transformed my existential vision and my valuation of metaphysical Western-centric theories that I ran across during my MA in philosophy and MA in sociology-anthropology.
I had the privilege to regularly meet with family heads, judges, priests of affliction and healing cults as well as male and female diviners from the shamanic tradition who generally spoke to me in truth and confidence. They helped me to contextually comprehend the hosts’ intuitive and imaginative feel-thinking, categorical determinations and conceptual assumptions. In contexts of conflict or social untying, they delighted me with ritual processes and their remobilisation of significant structures of affects, senses, feelings, gestures and other bodily experiences, which they put into play efficiently. This giving and taking solidified our alliance and was accompanied by a feeling of heavy debt towards the host society and a longing for authenticity in my research reports and accounts of experiences.
As the reader may surmise, this type of alliance that I envisaged with my host group was an offshoot of a number of questions that
played on my mind throughout my research and and up to today. Is it possible for an anthropologist to be adopted by a culturally other group and be regarded as a guest or member of the group; or does she in essence remain a stranger? Should the anthropologist become a spokesperson on behalf of the host group, or is she primarily an intercultural interpreter, hence a go-between? In her writings, who is actually speaking, from where and for whom? What does it mean to grant authority to her words or writing? And to what extent can it be said that the anthropologist bridges the unthought and unspoken that marks the emotions and pressing concerns, next to some basic presuppositions and unquestionable truths in both the host group and the anthropologist’s society and culture of origin and education?
I now come back to the incisive questioning of my anthropological quest, which I reported at the beginning of this chapter. Here is how I formulated an initial response at the 1986 colloquium by the CERA in Kinshasa (Cahiers des religions africaines 1993-94), attended by some 150 persons, including many senior members of the catholic clergy and, most likely, by some agents of the regime’s secret service agents. I had arrived in Kinshasa less than a week previously. At that time, president Mobutu’s autocratic party-state was on the wane, partly due to economic inflation. It was as though the attendants were particularly anxious and cautious to avoid any selfquestioning or groundbreaking debate. The following witnessing of my alliance with local healers appeared untimely if not uncanny:
“After twelve years of absence from the Congo, I would like to further clarify my positioning as a researcher among Yakaphone people, as I did yesterday in Bumbu when provoked by the cult healer Kha Lusuungu. I will try to do so by associating myself with the Yaka widower: he ends his mourning by paying a visit to his maternal uncle or mother’s brother. Indeed, it is prescribed that at this visit he offers ‘palm wine’ — that is, a share of the gifts he received by way of condolences, majored by a portion of the proceeds from his basket weaving or other handicraft in the funeral house.”
He does so in the following coded terms:
Nge ngwaasi, tala malafu wusa kumina kumbika meni. / Uncle, here is your share of the palm wine that was offered me [as a mortuary compensation]. With this gift I terminate my period of mourning. / Taa yisalu kyaama, yibitsatsala. / Here is what I have produced and I hasten to share it with you. / Wapheka bimenga. / Please offer me the meal of familial communion” (cf Devisch &
de Mahieu 1979: 137-138).
As a matter of fact, my anthropological experience in northern Kwaango in the 1970s was marked by my own bereavement with regard to a good number of presuppositions and self-evident truths which I had inherited through my natal Flemish culture. My stay in Kwaango sharpened my sensitivity to people’s pre-reflective bodily sensitivity and methods of attuning to one another and to the world of spirits. My address at the colloquium was an initial attempt to handle my ethical debt:
“As a sign of recognition to you, my Kwaangolese hosts, I would like to bequeath you with my anthropological writings in the hope that they may contribute in some way to strengthening your pride and that of your descendants. May the intercultural exchange, to which my writings testify, help to compensate for the moral debt that I have incurred as a guest while drawing from the intimate springs of your culture”.
It is important to note that in Yaka society and culture, based on oralcy and direct contact which is not facilitated by technology, the encounter occurs first on the interbodily level. Initially, my experience of this contact was often an unreflected one, sometimes tinted with a glare, sometimes with confusion or a misconception impossible to trace or prevent, given the innermost (or intrasubjective) and sociocultural otherness differentiating my guests from myself, the young anthropologist. Here, I refer to the meetings I organised in Taanda in particular, meetings that I could only begin to understand in a circumstantial way after months of learning the language, the cultural values and the verbal and nonverbal forms
of communication. These were meetings that had the potential to attain the transcultural and the panhuman. These experiences, orchestrated by healer-priests of affliction cults and dealing with information of the initiatory type, took place in a spirit of consensual exchange, but could in some respects have been considered to be too forced or inappropriate because of my foreign background and thus my inability to be verbally initiated in such a cult. In any case, these were benevolent meetings lacking an agreed leader, meetings which manifested as very committed, although likely to run out of words or result in the consciousness on both sides of a point of the unspeakable in the very heart of an intensely shared humanity.
Moreover, during these intercultural encounters, my Yakaphone interlocutors and me, we experienced the unspeakable that was particularising the strangeness or extimacy within each of us (see thesaurus). The unspeakable or untellable covered latent axioms or what was a priori implied yet unmentionable in their life-style and worldview. It seemed to me that, when having arrived at the core of a paradox or something unnameable within the family or authority institution, or relating to an affliction or trauma associated with ancestors or witchcraft, all interpretative verbal cognition ended up failing. The unknown or the unspeakable was then punctuated by a respectful silence. Interspersed with smiles, this zero point dissolved with the formal sharing of palm wine, signifying the end of the meeting, via the simple expressions of thanks and farewell uttered by the person serving the wine.
Let us now expand the approach. Our unconscious desire, inclination, interests, dreams and longings, just like our suffering, disgust and resentment have an interbodily and intrasubjective as well as intersubjective dimension. They are traversed by a hallucinatory and unconscious debate with underlying phantasms.
During actual encounters, we can unconsciously transfer our anguish, vulnerability, aversion, sympathy or passion to our guests in a contactual transference or co-resonance. Before we were born, we were dreamed and imagined by our parents or affected by certain aspects of their desire, obsessions and unfulfilled ambitions and traumas that they in turn had unknowingly inherited too from their parents and close family.
Thoughts from Didier Anzieu (1984, 1987), the later Lacan, René Kaës and co-authors (Kaës et al. 1998), as well as from Wim van Binsbergen (1991, 2003, 2016), can help us to unravel the unconscious but culturally shaped, imaginary dimension of our cultural self as it unfolds in the intercultural encounter. The cultural self — both of the anthropologist and the host group’s members
— is transmitted and shaped, among other things, by the parental culture and that of the local society, including the mother tongue (possibly alternated by that of other close persons). It is equally passed on through the maternal, parental, family and residential group, as well as by affects and drives, desire and dreams, phantasms and unconscious motions. Moreover, the determining culture comprises the habitual dispositions, perceptions and images, thoughts and shared tasks.
Intense intercultural encounter ensues from the attentiveness to cultural differences as well as from the unthought and unspoken in the family and residential group. The thoughtful experience of the transcultural ensues from the intercultural. The anthropologist will, for sure, experience how the hope she places in intercultural encounter unfolds with the help of the host group’s members, but not by pushy, impatient or transverse behaviour. Its at times perplexing effect, possibly triggering a regressive dimension, may stem less from the cultural other than from the emotion, anxiety or agitation gripping the body of the one involved, be it the anthropologist or anyone else. For example, detailed information on witchcraft can be disconcerting and deeply affect client and priest- healer, anthropologist and host alike. The long silence on the part of the ritual specialist and anthropologist on such occasions is the enactment of a reservation, a fear or anxiety.
In retrospect, my reflexivity suggests that my privileged relationship with some diviners and a cult’s priests-healers made them sense something in me that affected them as much as it did me. I wonder if the unwavering remembrance of suffering, which can be traced back to my childhood came into resonance with the diviner’s traumatic experiences and compassion as it is at play when she professionally proceeds to disclose (-dihudika) the client’s predominant affects, emotions and bad fate or affliction. This question opens up other ones. Indeed, whose field of ambivalent
desire — both vital and toxic — is the diviner about to bring out: is it that of the afflicted, the consultant, the maternal uncle or the agnatic elders? Is the mutual admiration and openness to strangeness, in my interlocutors and myself, nurtured by the shared consciousness of this fluid and unspeakable dimension of otherness and extimacy?
Does the awareness of being allies also rest upon what is destined to remain largely unconscious and indescribable?
The Yakaphone people
Yakaphone society is part of the northwestern border of the vast politico-cultural Luunda kingdom, to which among others belong the Ndembu (Turner 1968) and Nkoya of Zambia (van Binsbergen 1992), as well the Luunda of southern Kwaango (De Boeck 1991, 1994). Shared location, language, history and customary rule are used as criteria to define the Yaka or Yakaphones. They live in the vast expanses of the southern savannah in the borderland with Angola. The Yakaphones consider themselves as a united society under the authority of the paramount Kyaambvu and a dozen sovereign chiefs allied to him as younger brothers, each governing a region (Devisch & Brodeur 1999). Present day Yaka society and culture are thus the product of prolonged political and cultural influence of the Luunda to the south, and the Koongo to the north.
The Yakaphones of Kwaango — also called Kwaango land or Kwaango region — may be estimated at about 800,000 (de Saint Moulin 2006 & Personal communication September 2016).
The Taanda settlement of villages (comprising some 1,300 persons) is located in north Kwaango land, an hour’s walk from the Waamba River, west of Mosaamba as centre of the thus called
“administrative sector”. In DR Congo’s administrative idiom, the
“administrative district of Kwango” exceeds Yaka land (and the diocese of Popokabaka) by three territories; namely, those of Kimvula in the north and of Feshi and Kahemba in the south (Plate 1). Yaka land covers an area that is 1.5 times the size of Belgium;
the administrative district of Kwango is twice that of Yaka land. In the border zone of Kwaango land, several hundred thousand of people speak Yaka or some akin language (such as Koongo or Suku), but withstand the authority of Luunda political traditions and the
The stability of marital relations in the Kwaango region among others results from the gender hierarchy that lies at the core of the local world order. This order is basically fuelled by a collective imaginary with regard to the gender division of the reproductive tasks in the family group. All women are expected to become mother and take on the responsibility not only for childbirth and upbringing (with, on average, three or four children per family), but also for the arduous tasks of subsistence farming and of daily nourishment of the close family. Fishing and the seasonal collection of insects and fungi, next to the manual hunting for reptiles, mice, mole rats and cane rats are a female activity, complementing the small-scale agriculture (cassava, beans, peanuts, corn, spices) generally providing only low yields. The much-touted preserves of male production entail engendering offspring, house-building, clearing fields for agriculture, occasional hunting and furnishing the requisite firewood.
It is up to the bridegroom, and later the husband, to come up with the capital (in the 1990s equivalent to one year of minimum wage), to be invested into the matrimonial reserve of the bride’s patriclan.
A similar amount is needed for clothes and household utensils for the newly married. It is up to senior men in the residential group to ensure the new family unit’s social reproduction by means of palaver and ritual procedures such as gift giving and protection, initiation or cure. Despite the fact that a quarter or more of the younger generation of males migrates to Kinshasa in search of cash, the daily sustenance of the Yakaphone population is increasingly precarious.
Yakaphone society is based on a bilinear kinship system. The individual — representing a node in family relations — is at the intersection of both the patrilineal line and the uterine progeny.
The patrilineal line of rights and privileges determines the individual’s status or social persona. It is through the uterine progeny that the mother bears life. From the agnatic point of view, it is the genitor who is valued for his “erectile and fertilising power” (khoondzu ye ngolu4). The patrilineal society organises itself into minimally hierarchical and centralised patrilineages. The lineage (yikhanda, yitaata) includes all individuals who, by means of agnatic filiation, link their distant ancestry (kaanda) to the same founding ancestor of the patrilineage as well as to the primordial founders (bakhaaka)
of the local society. Just like the foliage of a tree that overshadows a meeting, the common ancestry covers the members of the same name lineage (phu, literally, head covering). Generally, members of the same lineage inhabit a common territory, following the principles of virilocal household residence and of lineage segmentation to the rhythm of successive generations.
The uterine bond that ties each person to her or his mother, mother’s mother, maternal grand- and great-grandmother, as well as other close maternal relatives, represents a life-regenerative tie with the chthonic womb of all life. The matrilineal or uterine line does not commemorate any ancestor. It taps from this cyclically self-regenerating cosmic source of all life situated in “the primordial life-spring or womb of the earth” (ngoongu). It is cosmologically, but not strictly geographically, associated with the wellspring of the Waamba river which drains the eastern side of the Kwaango region of its rain. The mythical stock of the highly vitalising kaolin-like clay (pheemba) is closely associated with this wellspring. Drawing from this source through the veins of maternal life, the mother transmits the soft body parts: the organs, the blood, the innate physical traits and the individual gifts or flaws, as well as the singular physiognomy (yibutukulu). The tree — with its roots in the earth, its foot, its trunk and its branches — inspires the underlying metaphor of uterine reproduction: each branch stems from an alliance for which a patrilineal group has given a woman in marriage to another patrilineal group in order to transmit life there. In counterpart to the reproductive capacity that the mother brings to the husband’s household and in order to sustain the life of the bride and her descendants, gifts are given by the husband’s patrilineage at each stage — puberty, marriage, pregnancy, status promotion, initiation ritual and death. This way, compensations (mainly white fabrics) are gifted to the uterine lifegivers.
Even though half of the Kwaangolese people have taken advantage of elementary school education over the recent decades, it is important to acknowledge that, since the late 1980s at least, rural areas have increasingly been bereft of good educational opportunities. For example, aside from the bible, one can hardly find any newspapers or books in rural areas. It is fair to say that literacy in the Kwaango region has not been a mutational force and has failed to
take hold of the society at the level of its sociocultural foundations and its basic beliefs. Although there are no recent statistical data regarding religious affiliations in the Kwaango region, it can be estimated that nowadays, half of its population self-defines as christian, having either been baptised at school age or having joined a neopentecostal church movement thereafter. The bureaucratic state slowly permeates the Kwaango region, primarily through civil services and schools, as well as through men’s stays in Kinshasa. Mercantile imports such as corrugated metal sheets, cement, beer, and imported mass consumer goods are also slowly becoming common, but at high prices due to the transport from Kinshasa.
In the flow of daily life, village people put a great deal of care in attuning their conduct and activities to the habitual reproductive, health seeking and transformational objectives, be they sexual, alimentary, agricultural or technical. They consider the lunar or seasonal recycling of life-forms to reverberate in the local group’s vitality. In other words, a person’s feelings and sensations, perceptions and representations, thinking and speech tend to deeply resonate with the daily social and ecological processes. More concretely, an individual’s and kin-group’s rhythm and reproductive activities, as well as funerals and ancestral cult, develop in tandem with people’s local life-world or universe of the living. Here, there is no hierarchical modern nature/culture divide at stake. Instead, these realms are organised along a continuum; culture, after all, is a part of nature. The individual’s life-force, bodily-felt experience and commitments are intrinsically geared toward enhancing the interrelations and interspecies resonance with the many modalities of life at play at multiple levels. Space and time are not uniform categories but are moulded by, and adapt to, the changing interactions, relational moods and properties of the actors and context.
Following political independence in 1960 and over the course of just a few years, a significant number of men from the Kwaango region moved to Kinshasa, settling in shanty towns. They were in search of a modest income as pousse-pousseurs (pushing hand-driven carts), motorcar guards, night guards or as helpers in construction yards. Some managed to build a rudimentary house amidst kin.
Others returned to their home village after a couple of years, having
earned just enough money to purchase clothing and a few tools for their own use or to meet the terms of matrimonial or funeral transactions. From the late 1970s onwards, those Kwaangolese who managed to achieve secondary education migrated to Kinshasa in search of modern, urban opportunities. In doing so, most educated youngsters severed their ties with the rural world of their youth.
Around the turn of the millennium, Yakaphone people, of whom there are now at least half a million in Kinshasa, live primarily in ethnocultural clusters in unplanned zones or townships beyond the indigenous cité of colonial times. These poor zones with large clusters of Yakaphones include Bumbu to the north, or Mbanza Lemba, Ngaba and Selembao to the south, as well as Ngaliema-Camp Luka to the east, and Masina and Kimbanseke to the west. The houses in these zones are usually rudimentary, constructed with breezeblock walls and tin roofs, containing two or three small rooms. These squatting areas are still without some of the most basic urban services. Kerosene lamps are the only source of light, cooking is done on charcoal fires and water is drawn either from a nearby watercourse or from shallow wells near one’s dwelling. Around 1986, the major streets of the unplanned zones became connected to the electric lines and water mains, but even today, paved roads, sewage and sanitary systems, piped water supply are hardly provided. Only a few homes along these streets have electricity. Today, Ngaliema- Camp Luka, for example, still resembles an immense village with its unfenced lots, numerous unfinished homes and many roads inaccessible to motor vehicles. Shelters built on hillsides subject to serious erosion are in danger of being washed away by the heavy rains from February to April. Masina and Ngaliema-Camp Luka have the lowest proportion of residents with educational and employment qualifications in Kinshasa. In 1976, 46.6 per cent of the populace of Masina was described as being illiterate; today, the estimate is even higher. Masina is nicknamed the People’s Republic of China because of its dense settlement.
Since the 1990s, the harsh experience of most emigrants from Kwaango, stranded in these poverty-stricken shanty towns, is one of joblessness and miserable living conditions. Youths engage in small practices of acquisition and survival such as participating in the predatory economy of the street, a common euphemism for
petty theft (Devisch 1995a). Early immigrants, now in their fifties or sixties, report that they increasingly find themselves to be confronted with these youths’ so-called possessive individualism, waning family solidarity and insubordination, all labelled as diseases of the city. Female vendors sell small quantities of daily essentials from their makeshift stands on each street corner: bread, cassava flour, vegetables, peanuts, fish, sugar, milk, fruits and cola nuts.
Modest quantities of firewood or charcoal, nails, pieces of board, grass for mattresses or mats, and similar goods are also for sale. In most of Kinshasa’s townships, each family has its own shady fruit tree. Word-of-mouth communication, popularly called radio-trottoir (literally, sidewalk-radio), broadcasts both information and rumour to the entire neighbourhood. In this way, a newcomer will quickly trace a relative or an acquaintance prepared to offer hospitality or help, namely a chair or a mat for sleeping.
Rural and urban residents seem to mutually develop both continuity and polarity in their lifestyles, social imaginary and symbolic categories. Since the 1970s, there have been increasing exchanges from the rural area and its small towns to the city and vice versa. These concern material as well as symbolic means of livelihoods, especially when it comes to the pursuit of health or the appeasement of the deceased. Respected senior women or matrons in the Kwaango region have set up local associations to mobilise young people to work as commuter-traffickers of locally produced cassava, groundnuts, maize and charcoal; these are primarily provided at below-market prices to emigrated family members.
From the 1990s onwards, the unsettling life conditions notwithstanding, people in the suburbs and shanty towns dream of connecting their living modes to global conjunctions. The modern- minded aim at enrolling in Western-derived education, speaking the lingua franca of Lingala or even the national language of French.
But the majority of deprived Kinois, among whom a great many Yakaphone slum dwellers, are certainly undergoing a process of profound self-questioning with regard to the contradictions in which they feel themselves caught. They are still facing an alienating colonial past following the political independence succeeded by the rise of a predatory state (Bayart 1989), unreliable civil services and the “politics of the belly”.
